Sun tattoos

This text belongs to a set of three, all related to the sun. I have written them simultaneously in the same period. There is no particular order to them. This is the first one to be published.

This image belongs to the artist Wood, whose work you can find here.

The sun is invisible. You cannot, do not, look at the sun as you look at any other thing. In fact, the sun as we know it, is neither just a thing. The pen with which I am writing this text is a thing, my shirt is a thing, the plant on my desk is a thing. I can look at them, directly, hold them, touch them. They all appear in the light of the sun. The sun itself, however, is invisible, hidden in its own light. Not too invisible, like a glass window or a spider web, but too visible. As children we are thought not to look into the sun directly because it is blinding. In the light of the sun, the blind and those that can see are equal, invisibility and overvisibility are not that different.

Any image of the sun depicts something no one has ever seen, but which every living creature in time and existence has encountered. And yet, all images of the sun depict that one unmistakable light source. Depicted even before it was written about.

To depict the sun, is to make visible the invisible, to give form to the formless, just like the sun draws out the world, gives it lines, colours, and edges. To draw its image, to paint its picture, is an act of creativity, of creation, not imitation.

Thus, any image of the sun, does what the sun does, and is, to a certain degree, more than merely an image. Rather, it performs. We should say, then, that the accuracy of a depiction of the sun lies not in the quality of its imitation, in a visual similarity, but in its performativity, in its ability to do as the sun does. Perhaps it would be more apt to appreciate a portrayal of the sun for its act of making visible the invisible, instead for what it supposedly portrays.

In and with the image of the sun, the world and the sun switch places: not the sun renders visible the world, but the world makes visible the sun. And now it is the artist, the canvas, the pencils and brushes, the world itself, that become invisible in the act of making visible. The canvas and the strokes are no longer merely visible, but point to something else, the sun, and dissappear behind this idea. What one sees is the ‘sun’, and for a second, nothing else.

In portraying the act of rendering visible, of giving a picture, the sun-image indirectly shines light on the world insofar it is covered in light. The trees, the streets, the strangers, are no longer merely visible, but visible as made visible. The world appears as in a painting, painted by the invisible sun.

To carry with oneself a tattoo of the sun, then, is to carry with oneself an entrance to the paintedness of human life, the strange twilight between ideal and real that we always already inhabit. At the basis of the painting in which we live, in which we get up, eat, dance fall in love, and move on, lies a visible invisibility, or an invisible visibility. And, in contrast with any other type of image, the tatttoo explicitly attaches its life and fate to the life and fate from which it sprouts and to which it belongs.

The suntattoo is the appropriation of both the paintedness of our world, and our ability to paint and make our world. It changes slighlty the angle of our outlook, showing us our halo, the blanket of light that covers our loved ones, the being-divine of our world, our friends, our homes.

I can draw or write you a world, a place somewhere between life and death, between the eye and darkness.